Unexpected Choices

In my life there have been numerous “God” incidences. Some of them were trivial others life changing. 

When I was 17 and a senior in high school, I applied for college because that’s what my friends were doing. There was no expectation in my family that any of us would go to college. There were then four kids in my family (later five). Dad’s pay barely stretched to meet the monthly bills. The only person I knew who had graduated from college was my uncle who went on the G.I. Bill after the Korean War.  My cousin went to Kilgore Jr. College and was a Rangerette for one year before she dropped out and got married. I had always assumed that after high school I’d just get married and be a housewife like my mom. Like her, I might work for a while before I had kids.

I took the SAT and ACT tests and applied to both of the major state universities because that’s what my classmates were doing. I was accepted to both. One offered a tuition scholarship. That was wonderful, but it didn’t seem that there would be any way to use the scholarship. I had no plan. My family had no money to spare. I had not been working with the school counselors or been in contact with their university counterparts. I had not really considered even the possibility of attending college until the last few months of my senior year.

I went to the office and told my tale of woe to the counselor, Mr. Garcia. On awards night, I was surprised to learn that I had been awarded a $500 scholarship from a local business. That was enough to pay for my board and room for the first year of school. I had to ask for $65 from my parents to finish out the last month. 

After that first year, I was able to work enough during the summer and school year to hang in and finish. There were times when I had to shake my piggy bank and empty out the last few coins to eat, but I made it. Jobs turned up on the bulletin board. I was hired sight unseen to be a camp counselor. There was always just enough.

When my husband was shipped out to Vietnam in November of 1969, I hadn’t found a job. I had been waiting, hoping that he’d get assigned somewhere else. I didn’t begin looking for anything until late in the year. The public school had already filled its positions. I had worked as a sub at McCurdy School a few days. The day after Bill shipped out I received a call from the Catholic school. I hadn’t considered applying there. Would I be interested in interviewing for a job teaching 7^th and 8^th grade? Sister Thomas Mary had gotten my name and number from Mrs. Schutzel who had been a high school counselor. I don’t know how Mrs. S knew I was back in town, but I happily accepted the position and went to mass every Friday for the rest of the school year.

Hack, Hack, Hack

I’m getting real tired of being sick. I caught some respiratory thing in early June and it seems to have gone away, but has left me with worse coughing than my usual amount—which is way too much. Now instead of coughing for a while in the afternoon and evening, I’m hacking almost all day. My throat is sore and I’m worn out. Usually I get through till noon pretty well, but after that I’m pretty much miserable and getting to sleep has become a crapshoot. Can I lie down yet? Or should I just stay up longer and hope I’ll eventually get to sleep.

I’m hoping that eventually this will pass. It’s not quite as bad as my old hacking spells before the miracle of 2007, but it is close. It’s hard to enjoy doing anything. Went to the doctor early on and probably should have gone back when I wasn’t over it after the first two weeks. Now she’s supposed to be getting her knees replaced and is off for the next month. I have an appointment with the lung doctor in August, but that’s a whole month away and he’s 100 mile trip from here if I did make an additional appointment earlier.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Once more into the Fray

“I’ve been listening all the night time. I’ve been listening all the day (in the words of one of our Jug Band songs).” I have. I have been listening to Jess Lahey and K.J. Dell’Antonia night and day for weeks. I got sucked in to their podcast #AmWriting. It is entertaining as well as informative and just plain fun to listen to.

The podcast is about writing and all things related to writing and their lives as professional writers. I’m not sure I’d want to be a professional writer even if I could. I wrote my four little books and self-published them, but I’m not into self-promotion, agents, book tours and pitching. I’m not writing in order to buy food. I’m writing just because I want to, because things occur to me that I want to put on paper and think about out loud.

Maybe I’m just dabbling since I’m not writing for fame or fortune. I don’t much care if anyone reads what I write. I just want to write it because I happen to like putting the words on the paper. Lately I’ve killed way more time listening to them talking about writing than I have spent on actually “keeping your butt in the chair and your head in the game” – their words not mine. It’s been months since I’ve written anything new. I spent part of that time revising and re-revising my first book. I can’t seem to finish with it. When I read it, I find things that could be phrased better or little errors which need to be fixed. When I rephrase and fix, I inevitably introduce new cut and paste errors which must then be fixed in the next pass which introduces its own set of new errors to fix. It never ends.

When I used to type up tests for one of the professors, I constantly had to redo my work because he would come back with just a little tweak to make the questions less ambiguous. Eventually he had to quit rewording because it was time to hand out the test questions. I need a deadline to force me to cease and desist. I can’t leave well enough alone. I hope this last updated version is better than the first. The only one who has benefited thus far is the publishing company which has produced and shipped six proof copies to me which I’ve marked up and changed and reordered.

To Blog or Not to Blog

I began blogging several years ago and turned those blog posts into four little books. I began to wonder if my online footprint was bigger than I wanted it to be so I took all of the posts down. 

Having the blog allowed me to think out loud and work through a number of issues that had plagued me since childhood. I keep thinking that I am finished dealing with those issues, but over and over I dredge them up. 

When I was younger, I was busy with the day to day work that had to be done to keep a household running. Now I have a great deal more time to wonder about what was happening while I was on auto pilot. I have begun to realize that things that I took for granted as the truth may not have been quite that black and white. My view of life was colored by the people and situations that were part of my life. I never stopped to think that those situations weren't universal, that other people had different expectations than I did because of the limited reach of my personal experience. 

 

Some of my world view has been colored just by the timeline of my life. I grew up at the dawning of the woman's movement back in the Ozzie and Harriet days of the 1950s when women wore dresses even at home. Easter is coming up soon and then Mother's Day. When I was a child each of us got a new Easter outfit complete with little white gloves and hats for church. On Mother's Day each of us had either a red or white carnation corsage to wear. Ladies wore nylons with seams up the back, held up with garter belts or girdles. Mamie Eisenhower was the First Lady and we all dressed a lot like she did.

I'm not sure if I have any new observations to make that are relevant. Now days I spend several hours a day listening to podcasts by various people including Oprah, Gretchen Rubin, Jess and K.J., and Liz and Sarah, and NPR. Those people, who are one and all a generation younger than me, have grown up with an entirely different view of life. Maybe I'm no longer relevant.